Disclaimer: I work for Netconomy which was one
of the sponsors of Write the Docs Prague 2016 and 2017.

Mikey Ariel presenting the sponsors.

Between 10 September and 12 September a colleague and I were once again in
Prague for this year’s Write the Docs
Prague conference. We once again
skipped the boat tour but arrived just in time for the Writing Day where we
both tried as best as possible to contribute to various projects present there.

For me this mostly meant trying to continue my work from the WTD conference in
Portland earlier this year. There a couple of people including myself worked on
bringing a small video archive to the
writethedocs.org website. Thankfully,
Leonardo had already done the design and all I
had left to do now was getting all the data rendered into HTML files through
Sphinx. Sam and Eric then reviewed my changes and could get it to work and
online on 15 September 😀

To be fair, it took me up until Tuesday to get my patch in order but let’s just
say that all that was at least mostly related with the Writing Day 😉 But Write
the Docs isn’t just about sprinting on documentation but also two days fully
packed with sessions by speakers from all over the world. All had something I
could take home and see a use-case for at work, but if I had to choose the one
talk that offered the most for me then I’d pick “Telling a Great Story on
GitHub” by Lauri
Apple.

During this talk she explained how Zalando is
bringing and overarching structure and story to what software they opensource
through Github and how that method has evolved over the years. I’m pretty sure
this is something every company trying to be a good opensource-citizen is
struggling with and so any input there (esp. as well prepared as this one) is
very much welcome!

Another highlight this year was the social event. While last year’s evening
party was nice, this year the location was just perfect: The Hangar
Bar, a bar with an airline-theme including the
staff being clad in board-crew-inspired uniforms. I haven’t enjoyed a bar as
much as this one in a very long time! If you go there, don’t forget to also
visit the basement section!

And while you are in Prague, make sure to come to next year’s Write the Docs 😉